As the French Do

With the left hand, hold an asparagus upright in the heart of an artichoke while a wall of the sauce is built around it with the right hand.—”The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook.”

How can a sauce be a wall? Why does Toklas swerve from the hortatory to the passive in mid-sentence? To answer these questions, it is necessary to cook the dish called Hearts of Artichokes à la Isman Bavaldy, which Toklas offers as an example of French haute cuisine on pages 11-12 of her cookbook. It was, she tells us, one of the courses in a nine-course lunch for sixteen at a fashionable French home to which she and Gertrude Stein had been invited, and which included Aspic de Foie Gras, Salmon Sauce Hollandaise, Hare à la Royale, Pheasants Roasted with Truffles, Lobster à la Française, Singapore Ice Cream, cheese, and fruit.

”It does not take as long as it sounds to prepare this dish,” Toklas writes of Hearts of Artichokes à la Isman Bavaldy, and she is right. The recipe is actually harder to read than the dish is to prepare. There are so many steps that one cannot take them in; one’s eyes glaze over, one’s thoughts wander. However, shopping for the ingredients (which Toklas doesn’t list—you just bump into them as you read) refocusses the mind. The ingredients are: artichokes, asparagus, lemons, cardamom seeds, sweetbreads, shallots, coriander seeds, butter, flour, dry champagne, and bread crumbs.

You cook the artichokes in water to which lemon juice, cardamom seeds, and salt have been added, and then remove the leaves and put them aside. They are not part of the dish. (“The leaves can be scraped with a silver spoon and mixed with a little cream to be used in an omelette or under mirrored eggs,” Toklas writes, trying to be helpful, but only adding to the forbidding length of the recipe.) Then you boil the asparagus until it is just tender, and cut each spear “within 2 inches of the tip.”

Earlier, you have started to deal with the sweetbreads. Toklas says to soak them in cold water for an hour; boil them for twenty minutes with salt, shallots, coriander seeds; plunge them into cold water; “remove tubes and skin” (very messy); and, finally, put them through a strainer with a potato masher. I found that unworkable and made a mush of them in the Cuisinart. Next, you sauté the sweetbread mush in butter, and add flour and then champagne. “Cook gently until this sauce becomes stiff.”

And now comes the improbable (and, as it proved, impossible) building of the wall of sauce. Toklas’s wobbly sentence clearly expresses the anxiety of the moment and subtly enacts the disparity between what the two hands are doing: the left hand confidently clutching the asparagus spear, the right hand helplessly plastering its base with the sauce, which no amount of cooking can make into the cementlike substance needed to hold the spear upright when the left hand releases it. The recipe called for twelve artichoke hearts. I cooked six, and six times failed to keep the asparagus from drooping miserably into the pool of sauce gathering in and messily spilling out of the artichoke heart. There was no way to make the dish presentable.

Well, was it good? No. The champagne (two cups of it), and a final browning with buttered bread crumbs, muddied the delicate taste of the sweetbread, and the asparagus and artichoke hearts similarly had no reason for being together—they cancelled out each other’s virtue. Nor could you taste the cardamom and coriander seeds. The dish took about two hours to prepare, three minutes to serve to game friends, who politely pushed it around on their plates, and ten seconds to throw out.

But the first time I cooked from “The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook,” in 1954, the year of its publication, when it was given to me for my birthday by an arty friend, was to quite different effect. Seven years had yet to pass before the appearance of “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” and, like most people living in pre-Julia America, I had never eaten real French food. Thus, when I took my first bite of the coq au vin I had made from Toklas’s recipe, on page 149, I could hardly credit my senses. I was stunned by the suave deliciousness of what I had produced. In all my life, I had never eaten anything of such complex and rich, and yet clear and pure, flavor. It was a moment of astonished rapture, one that I will never forget.

When I decided to cook the dish again recently, I doubted that the moment would be repeated. In 2002, Americans no longer need to be told, as Toklas told us with great condescension in 1954, that “the French never add Tabasco, ketchup or Worcestershire sauce, nor do they eat any of innumerable kinds of pickles, nor do they accompany a meat course with radishes, olives or salted nuts. . . . To cook as the French do one must respect the quality and flavor of the ingredients.” (When I first read these words, I was properly awed by them. I had not yet made Hearts of Artichokes à la Isman Bavaldy.)

But Toklas’s coq au vin—or “Cock in Wine,” as she called it for the sake of her radish-eating American readers—remains wonderful. The combination of fowl, pork lardoons, butter, carrots, shallots, onions, wine, brandy, and mushrooms is as felicitous as the combination of artichokes, asparagus, and sweetbread mush is ridiculous. It differs in one respect from the usual coq-au-vin recipe: Toklas uses white wine instead of red for the sauce, and I, for one, think this is a good idea. But in either manifestation coq au vin remains one of the glories of French bourgeois cuisine. The butter and pork fat aren’t good for the heart, but the dish is good for the soul.

Below, I reprint Toklas’s appealingly short recipe—its brevity and the ordinariness of the ingredients were what attracted me to it in 1954—followed by a sort of hovering Jewish mother’s version for use in 2002.

Cock in Wine No. 1

Cut a young cock or a young chicken in serving pieces. In an enamel-lined pot melt 3 tablespoons butter, add 3/4 cup diced side fat of pork, 6 small onions, 4 shallots and 1 medium sized carrot cut in thin slices. Brown these in butter. Remove and place pieces of chicken in pot and brown over high heat. Add salt, pepper and 2 cloves of crushed garlic. Remove the browned pork fat, onions, shallots and carrot. Heat 3 tablespoons brandy, light and pour into pot. Sprinkle 3/4 tablespoon flour into the pot. Stir with a wooden spoon for 2 or 3 minutes, then add 1 cup fresh mushrooms and 1 cup hot good dry white wine. Increase heat, add pork fat and vegetables. Cook uncovered for 1/4 hour. Serve very hot.

Cock in Wine No. 2

Buy four pieces of chicken and as small a slab of pork fat or bacon as you can find. Fill a cup to the 3/4 mark with pork fat you have diced into small pieces. Heat 1 tablespoon butter in a heavy enamelled or stainless casserole, and sauté the pork pieces until brown. Remove to a side dish. Add another tablespoon of butter to the pot (if needed) and sauté 12 small white onions, 8 large quartered shallots, and 4 sliced carrots until lightly browned. Remove and add to the side dish with two cloves of crushed garlic. Rub chicken pieces with salt and pepper, and brown over medium-high flame in the fat left in pot; then remove. Pour 3 tablespoons brandy into pot and light. When flames subside, add 3/4 tablespoon of flour and stir with a wooden spoon for about a minute over very low heat. Add one and a half to two cups dry white wine, then return chicken and vegetables and pork pieces to the pot. Cook covered over low heat for half an hour or until the chicken is properly done. While the chicken is cooking, sauté 4 or 5 sliced mushrooms in 1 tablespoon butter over high heat. Add them to the pot in the last five minutes of cooking. Taste the sauce—it will probably need salt. Serve with boiled new potatoes. ♦

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